Jackie Stewart, a triple Formula 1 world champion (1969-93), described how, while he wasn't an engineer of the cars he drove, he still needed a sense of how they worked (https://www.carandclassic.com/magazine/mechanical-sympathy-understanding-our-classics/), how they responded to what the driver was trying to do, a sense he called mechanical sympathy. Martin Thompson brought this concept into software (https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-mechanical-sympathy.html), by talking about how a similar knowledge of how computer hardware works is vital to writing high-performance software.